Saturday, March 13, 2010

Inefficiency

Many years ago, in 1953 to be exact, when I was being interviewed about the possibility of being given a medical discharge (never implemented, I think mostly because of my righteous attitude), during a 2-month stay in the Air Force hospital in Riverside, California following an attack of regional enteritis, the doctors said that no cure to that malady was known -- they had merely cut out a section of my intestines and let it go at that -- and I would always be under its threat, and that one of the effects would be that when I was older, I would be inefficient.

And this morning I mentioned to my wife that that seems to be happening, quite a lot. After all, I can't even keep this weblog running regularly, though each and every morning something and sometimes a lot of things pop into my head that I could easily put in it but never get around to it..

But she pooh-poohed that and said instead, "You're inefficient because you're absent-minded and also because you like to do things the hard way."

I couldn't argue with either of those, and just yesterday we had seen a vivid example of the former.

It had been raining all night, one of those gentle, steady downpours that are so great for sleeping and for beautiful things to pop up once more out of the ground following a hard winter. And I discovered that during my switcheroos of my computer monitors, I had left a perfectly good Dell Trinitron CRT 17-incher sitting outside in that rain on one of the side decks where we don't go often, intending to carry it back up to the workshop but then having forgotten about it.

This doesn't wreck my monitor situation, but I had been depending on keeping that one as a good backup.

I don't know if all the water ruined the monitor totally, having had a chance to enter through the numerous vent holes in the top, and I haven't read anything about that eventuality in the literature.

My plan is to wait at least a month before trying to turn it on. It will be interesting to see what happens. Meanwhile I positioned the monitor upside down, though I noticed that no water drained back out through the vent holes. Is that a good or a bad sign?

I am not a professor, but it seems that I've always been absent-minded, because there are so many interesting things to think about and all crammed up in the same bunches of time.

So my wife's comment hit a nerve in exactly the same way that my mother did so many years ago, when I was a child. Quite often that wonderful woman would say with mild exasperation that I would forget and leave my head sitting around, too, if it wasn't attached to the rest of my body by my neck.

But that's what happens when you are forever concerned with the Big Issues of the Day. Right?